The notion of a smart city is not a new one. We have envisioned smart devices communicating to each other, autonomous vehicles driving people around or making deliveries, traffic lights being controlled to optimize traffic flow, construction monitoring, street lights being managed for efficient energy use, threats to security high risk areas being detected and alerts being raised to the appropriate authorities. These are among the many applications we might expect to see in a smart city. We might also expect to be able to measure and monitor the impact of environmental and other factors on various systems, to be able to provide communications to outside entities or to communications devices, and to intelligently coordinate responses from different systems throughout a smart city.
Technological developments have spurred and continue to drive improvements in what we are able to detect and monitor in our environment and in how we are able to collect, evaluate, and extract key information from vast volumes of different types of data we never had access to before. In addition, the sheer amount and breadth of data available continues to increase with advances in our ability to sense and process data-generating events. The challenge lies in how to fully utilize the various sensors, smart devices, and generated data to provide meaningful applications that enable the functionalities we have come to expect in a smart city.
While advances have been made to enable certain functionalities, for example, in managing light system energy use as taught by U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,502,456, 8,716,942, and 8,963,433 to Jarrell et. al., in monitoring pipeline integrity as taught U.S. Pat. No. 8,903,558 to Jarrell et al., and in unmanned aerial vehicle communication, monitoring, and traffic management as taught in U.S. Pat. Nos. 9,087,451, 9,466,218, and 9,576,493 to Jarrell, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties, there is still room for improvement.